Polish scientists have repeated Milgram's famous experiment on their compatriots. It turned out that the Poles of the 2010s were no less willing to hurt people by submitting to authority than the Americans of the 1960s. The findings were published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in January 2017, and a press release in March drew attention to them.
Stanley Milgram, one of the most respected psychologists of the 20th century, conducted his classic experiment in 1963, inspired by the crimes of the Nazis during the Second World War. He wanted to find out how much suffering ordinary people can inflict on others if it is their responsibility. To do this, the scientist invited the average person to participate in an experiment, the purpose of which was to study the effect of pain on learning.
During the experiment, participants drew a fake lot to play the role of teacher or student. In fact, they always got the role of teacher, and the student was portrayed by a professional actor. The student had to memorize pairs of words and then play them back at the teacher's command. At the same time, the teacher had at his disposal a plausible-looking current generator with 30 switches from 15 to 450 volts in 15 volt steps. With each mistake, the supervising experimenter in a white coat ordered the teacher to give the student an electric shock, and with each subsequent error, the voltage increased by 15 volts. The actor portrayed an intensifying pain reaction, but the experimenter insisted on continuing the "learning", uttering four phrases in succession: "Please continue," "The experiment requires you to continue," "Absolutely necessary,to keep you going "and" You have no other choice, you must continue. " If the maximum tension was reached, it was applied three times, after which the session was terminated. Before starting the experiment, the teacher himself was given a demonstration shock with a voltage of 45 volts.
Experiment design: E - experimenter, T - teacher, L - student / Wikimedia Commons
The American experiment was supposed to serve only to debug the methodology, after which Milgram planned to conduct it in Germany in order to better understand the psychology of the citizens of this country during the war. However, the results turned out to be very eloquent: on average, 65 percent of the participants, obeying the authority of the experimenter, brought the student's punishment to the maximum, despite his "pain" and protests. Only about 12 percent stopped at 300 volts when the actor began to portray unbearable suffering. "I have found so much obedience that I do not see the need to conduct this experiment in Germany," - said the scientist.
Milgram's experiment was repeatedly reproduced in the USA, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria and Jordan with similar results (the average share of participants who completed it in the United States was 61 percent, and outside of them - 66 percent, the run ranged from 28 to 91 percent). Small changes in the study design, designed to exclude the influence of factors such as gender, social status, authority of the research center, ignorance of the danger of electric current and possible sadistic inclinations, did not significantly affect the results, as did the year of work. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, such experiments have not yet been carried out.
Employees of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Wroclaw decided to remedy this situation. “Our goal was to check how high the level of subordination is among the inhabitants of Poland. The special history of the Central European region has made the issue of subordination to authorities extremely interesting for us,”they write.
To reduce the psychological trauma of the participants, the scientists used a modification of the experiment based on the findings of the American psychologist Jerry Burger. He noted that the majority (79 percent) of the original work participants who made it to the 10th switch would also make it to the last 30th. Therefore, the level of subordination can be judged by the first 10 indicators of the impact voltage. This design was used by Polish psychologists to make the experiment more ethical. 40 men and 40 women aged 18 to 69 were invited to participate in it.
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90 percent of the participants, obeying the authority of the experimenter, made it to the last switch. The rate of refusal to complete the experiment was three times higher if the role of the student was performed by a woman, but the authors note that due to the small sample size it is impossible to draw unambiguous conclusions from this.
“Our research has once again demonstrated the tremendous power of the situation people are in, and how easily they agree to things that are unpleasant for themselves. Half a century after Milgram's work, a striking majority of subjects are still ready to shock a helpless person, commented one of the authors of the work, Tomasz Grzyb.
Oleg Lishchuk